


Une aube suffit

by footstepscatter (bluedreaming), kaithartic (bluedreaming)



Category: EXO (Band), raven boys
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 12:39:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3937117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedreaming/pseuds/footstepscatter, https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedreaming/pseuds/kaithartic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The what ifs in life involving a broken boy, flowers, and a second chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. If I had only felt

Down the corridor, there's a hushed whisper and a rustle of fabric, soft footfalls, _step, step, step_ —

_the smell of roses_

Kavinsky opens his eyes.

Everything is white.

_Why am I here?_

He's supposed to be dead. He can remember—

_the crushing pressure loud boom explosion silence tearing red veins behind his eyelids air motion metal numbness_ —

"I'm supposed to be dead," he says. His voice is barely a rasping whisper, sandpaper over scratched skin, but the footsteps pause.

Kavinsky doesn't move. He can't, and he doesn't want to anyway. _I don't want any of this._ He braces himself for pity, sympathy, pandering to a sick and twisted soul that has no remedy but to have its threads snipped by the fates, strings fraying until they unravel in the silence.

"Why?" a voice asks, from beside his bed, interrupting his thoughts. It's nothing except curious. Against his better judgement, Kavinsky looks.

And groans.

His entire body is pain, now that he's shifted, nothing sits and he can hardly breathe.

"I'll call the nurse," the voice says, and Kavinsky manages to see, now that he's moved and inflicted all of this upon himself; it's a tall man, maybe slightly older than him, clipboard in hand. _Florist delivery._ He looks concerned _now_ , but when all his nerve endings are exploding at him, _how many ribs did I break?_ Kavinsky can't seem to mind.

"Wait," he finds himself blurting out, over the pain or perhaps despite it. The figure stops, finger hovering above the call button.

"Yes?" The man is too tall; his face is strange, somewhat unearthly and his ears stick out on either side of his head. Suddenly Kavinsky feels like laughing; it's been a long time. _Decades._ Real laughter. He doesn't know this person at all, and they don't know him either.

"Could you ever like someone like me?" He cringes at his own words, chokes over his bubbling breath. The man presses the call button, and Kavinsky can hear the _click, click, click_ of heels coming down the hall. The man stands there for a moment, just looking. He smells like flowers.

"Joseph?" he doesn't quite ask, glancing at the name on the bedframe. "I don't know you at all." But he waits there, beside the bed, clipboard in hand. Kavinsky smiles as the nurse comes in and opens the morphine drip.


	2. One step closer

— _bringing up that topic_. . .the voices grow and then fade as footsteps approach and then recede down the hallway. He slumps back into the pillow.

Kavinsky is getting tired of no one asking anyone. No one says anything. The doctor comes in and pokes things and grins and makes notes which materialize in different things getting dripped into his veins, a rainbows of colours that he would rather dream than see.

He doesn't dream. As soon as he closes his eyes he opens them again and it's morning.  Kavinsky doesn't even know how he feels about this. His hands feel empty, that's the biggest thing.

He might miss dreaming but he doesn't miss people. How can he, when he was racing towards the end? _You don't miss the paramedic on the way to the hospital._

Every time he closes his eyes, it's still a surprise to wake up.

He lies there, between sheets, tracing patterns on the ceiling, watching the flowers wilt in the arrangement beside his head, the buzzing noise of the television turned down to white noise as people wave their hands around on the screen, houses burn, bombs fall, people die and are born and say things they'll regret. Slowly, his bones knit themselves back together, his skin cells reproduce and pull the smoothness back over his bones.

But his head is still waiting.

He doesn't know what day it is when he's woken up by the smell of flowers, life in the midst of cold and clean and antiseptic. It's hard to begin if you're perpetually beginning, stuck in the midst of being born. _Or maybe just dying the long way._

He recognizes the figure in the doorway before his brain catches up with him, peering up at a young man who's too tall, ears slightly too prominent, face obscured by an arrangement of creamy white lotuses. The man juggles the vase to one side to peer at his clipboard, revealing his face, so that when he looks up again his eye's meet Kavinsky's. They both blink.

_He won't remember me,_ Kavinsky thinks, and there's a strange kind of regret in the thought. He looks away, at the white walls, the city outside the window.

"Joseph!" the man says, and the smile in his voice is audible. "I didn't think I'd see you again."


	3. Follow

Hanging loosely around his neck, the red string still manages to filter into his peripherial vision. It's strange. Kavinsky isn't sure how it got there.

He isn't sure about a lot of things.

There's a clatter of wheels in the corridor and another nurse pops in, sunshiny smile on her face as she blinks when the light from the window hits her in the eyes. Kavinsky doesn't mind. It gives him a chance to rearrange his face; decide what expression he's going to wear.

_Uninterested or blatantly unfriendly?_

If it was one of the few male nurses he might try to flirt, but he can't quite manage anymore. He's so used to flirting with his things, not himself. Shiny steel, burnt rubber speed and faces on plastic. Without his trappings of the past, it's hard to know who he is.

And no one has come to see him.

The food tastes like hospital food, antiseptic for seasoning and mushy cotton balls for texture. Dreams are so much more satisfying, their weight heavy on his tongue. The rust in his mouth and sharpness in his throat when he dreams too fast; his fingers itch for the pills he doesn't have. The nurse frowns at him when she comes to retrieve the tray.

"You need to eat," she says, cranking his bed back down as pain shoots through his chest again. Kavinsky looks away.

The flowers catch his eye. He doesn't know who's sending them, probably something to do with his mother but he doesn't care about that. It's the smell that makes him smile. Just a little.

"I wonder when you'll come back," he whispers to the shadows lurking beneath the creamy petals. Maybe it's just his imagination, but he thinks he can hear familiar footsteps in the hall.

When he looks up, green eyes— _or is it blue?_ —drifting towards the door, what will he see?


	4. Light

"Too."

It's a strange word. Kavinsky rolls it around in his mouth, letting it drop off his mouth into the stillness of the room. It percolates in his thoughts.

_Nice to meet you too._

That was all Chanyeol had said—that was his name, after Kavinsky had finally asked—just a formality, meaningless words, things that people say without thinking. Customs drilled into our heads at an early age.

"Nice to meet you too." When Kavinsky says it, now, before, his past stretching behind him like a weight he can't shrug off, it sounds like a lie. When Chanyeol said it, the words seemed to mean something.

He picks at the red thread around his neck. At first he'd been confused, noticing it, but now he's used to it. Likes the sudden flash of red in an overwhelmingly white room, a reminder that _this is real_. Sometimes he still wakes up dying.

"Joseph?"

Kavinsky flips over, old habits die hard, and his chest explodes. Through gasps he muffles in the sheets, he sees familiar ash blond hair.

_Chanyeol?_

"Are you alright?" The florist deliveryman looks concerned, tiny wrinkles breaking up the smoothness of his forehead. Kavinsky doesn't like it.

_The crumpled metal of another Mitsubishi Evo._

He nods, waits for the pain to numb. "You just surprised me, that's all." 

"Sorry about that," Chanyeol says, the characteristic grin back on his face. "I brought you more flowers!" He motions to the arrangement of blue peonies in his hands, the light blue shading of the petals darkening into night at the centre. It looks like the past, somehow, too much blue and not enough red— _you can't ignore the pain_ —but he smiles up anyway. He likes the deliveryman more than the flowers. 

Chanyeol sets the arrangement down on the side table and makes a note on his clipboard. _Probably something like, Successful delivery!_ Kavinsky can already imagine the cheerful smiley faces dotting the white paper.

Chanyeol moves to leave and Kavinsky thinks about saying— _what?_ The red string slides over his collarbone as he lifts his arm, and there's a warning twinge in his chest.

Chanyeol smiles as he leaves, the sun lingering for just a moment longer before the rain comes.

_Maybe next time._


End file.
